Toward a Liberative Phenomenology of Zen

Abstract

Abstract The questions pursued in this essay are: What can philosophers today learn from a tradition of psychosomatic practice such as Zen Buddhism? How does such a tradition challenge the very methodology of our cerebral practice of philosophy? And finally: What would it mean to bring Western philosophy and the psychosomatic practice of Zen together, not necessarily to merge them into one, but at least to commute between them so that they may speak to and inform one another? In pursuing these questions, it is demonstrated, we have much to learn from the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy. The middle two sections of this essay explain how Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945) and Nishitani Keiji (1900-1990) challenged the disembodied methodology of Western philosophy by drawing on their psychosomatic practice of Zen. The final section of this essay critically compares and contrasts the psychosomatic practice of Zen with the pragmatist “somaesthetics” of Richard Shusterman. Shusterman himself pursued connections between his project and Zen practice, yet it will be argued that the guiding aims of his pragmatically and aesthetically orientated somaesthetics need to be distinguished from the primarily enlightening and liberative aims of the psychosomatic practice of Zen.